Partner Spotlight: Kasey Wien

Dig Inn is a farm-to-table restaurant with over 20 locations in New York & the North East, serving seasonal vegetables and culinary comfort food on a large scale. The company is built on a culture of driven curiosity, ambitious innovation and finding and implementing new solutions to offer simple, healthy, and affordable meals. Recipe development processes include a conversation between chef and grower, discussing what they want to cook and harvest. Recipes are then brought to life with each farmer planting crops specifically for Dig Inn menus.

One of the primary missions at Dig Inn is to build a better food system that works for everyone involved; customers, cooks and farmers too. Since their arrival to NYC in 2011, they’ve focused on the essentials of this mission; building kitchens, training chefs, and developing one-on-one relationships with over 50 partner farms.

Recently we spoke with Kasey Wien, the Associate Manager of Supply at Dig Inn. Kasey helps source, procure and purchase the ingredients that make the restaurant popular. With a Public Policy degree from Duke, a job in the food industry might seem like a disconnect, but the work she’s helping Dig Inn do is right in line with her goal of making an impact.

Partnering with local farmers to bring the farm-to-table movement to a broader audience is changing the food industry to serve everyone better. When restaurants source local food, it creates a smaller footprint on the planet, helps the local economy and farmers, and gets healthier food on the table. More patrons are looking to experience the dining out that Dig Inn provides.

Kasey first became aware of Dig Inn as a consumer. She says that it’s exciting & different from other fast casual food restaurants. It’s not only delicious, healthy, and wholesome but it’s also the sort of home-cooking you might have enjoyed as a child but don’t have time or energy to cook yourself.

Although Dig Inn has been busy expanding over the last decade, it wasn’t without growing pains. Cumbersome operation systems made it difficult to have a clear view of inventory and costing. Dig Inn was unable to easily roll out location or region-based pricing because there was no simple way to see costs by region. Kasey said, “We didn’t know if food costs were different from place to place. I could only go back a year and a half on location-based pricing.”

Foodager provided a more straightforward solution to alleviate buying, costing, and invoicing concerns. The takeaway for Dig Inn implementing Foodager has been the hours of time being saved while dealing with day-to-day issues. Kasey says that the Foodager solution has been user-friendly and helped consolidate formerly manual systems. “It’s great to place our order and invoices all in one place rather than many like we used to,” Kasey added.

From Kasey’s standpoint, the hardest part was deciding which features needed to get out first so that Foodager could create them. Once the system was up and running, there was the issue of training. The food industry is known to have a high turnover and staff aren’t very technical. To overcome the technological gap, Dig Inn created a training program to teach restaurant operators how to work with the new platform by a step-by-step usage guide and weekly follow-ups.

What’s Kasey’s secret to rapid growth in an organization like Dig Inn? “Be as organized as possible. Take a ton of notes. Be on top of all the tasks and things that come your way. And always be willing to step up, help, and keep a positive attitude when things change,” says Kasey.

The next few years for Dig Inn will be a period of expansion as they open in new cities, including Philadelphia in 2019. If you are on the East Coast, check out one of Dig Inn’s many locations. You’ll love it!